Shorts Backing Out of Major Tech (DELL, MSFT, YHOO, AAPL, AMZN, QCOM, GOOG, INTC, CSCO)

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published

If you think the long-gone uptick rule or naked shorting was important for financial stocks, you might wonder what was going on in technology stocks with short sellers.  In the major NASDAQ tech companies, there was a remarkable deterioration of the interest in short selling from just mid-July to late-July.  Below is a list showing the decrease in the short interest with two exceptions at the end:

  • Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) short interest dropped 5.8 million to 65 million
  • Microsoft (NASDAQ MSFT) short interest fell 7.7 million to 55.8 million
  • Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO) short interest dropped 7.1 million to 41 million
  • Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) short interest fell over 3.5 million to 21.5 million
  • Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) short interest dropped over 1.7 million to 32.1 million
  • Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) short interest fell 7.6 million to 25.9 million
  • Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) short interest fell over 750,000 shares to 5.25 million

The two exceptions out of our major tech stocks were as follows:

  • Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) short interest rose roughly 16 million shares to 106.3 million
  • Cisco Systems (NASDAQ: CSCO) short interest rose 800,000 shares to 69.2 million

Jon C. Ogg
August 12, 2008

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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